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Scraping

ES-DE supports the two scraper services ScreenScraper.fr and TheGamesDB.net.

Scraping allows you to make the games look "pretty" with coverarts, icons, discimages and more. Read up on the ES-DE userguide on scraping here:

ES-DE Scraper guide

Quick tips

  • On most occasions you want to use ScreenScraper and not TheGamesDB. But for PC titles scraping from TheGamesDB might be better.
  • You will need to register an account on ScreenScraper.fr to scrape (support them on Patreon for faster downloads, more scrapes per day and priority scraping).
  • Login to your Screenscraper.fr account inside of the ES-DE interface in RetroDECK
  • Choose what content you want to scrape (remember that each content you choose could take up several mb of data per game).
  • Do an initial scrape of all the games you want to scrape.
  • If some games are missed do a more narrow scraping by enabling Scraper -> Other Settings -> Interactive Mode -> On& Scraper -> Other Settings -> Auto-Accept Single Game Matches -> On and choose to scrape by games missing metadata. This will allow you to select each game from a list and also tweak the searches of the missing games.
  • In some cases you need to remove certain aspects of the name like if a rom comes both with a Japanese name and English name, you could try to remove one of the names to find a better result.